The Winter Thief

9

It was near dawn when Gabriel approached Bebek, a village north of the city on the Bosphorus shore. It had stopped snowing, and everything was muted by mist, the quiet punctuated by the raucous laughter of gulls. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer from a nearby minaret. A faint pink wash outlined the Asian hills on the far side of the strait, a band of tarnished silver against the black landscape. Gabriel came to a high wall and lifted a thick fall of ilex with numb hands, unmindful of the avalanche of snow this released onto his head and shoulders. He forced the gate and slipped into the barren garden of Yorg Pasha’s mansion.

The guards were suspicious, but at Gabriel’s insistence they fetched Simon, the pasha’s secretary, who Gabriel had previously noted seemed never to sleep. Simon arrived in minutes, fully dressed in a crisp stambouline frock coat and tie. If he was surprised to see Gabriel, he gave no sign.

Gabriel told him he had to see Yorg Pasha.

“It’s six in the morning, Gabriel. The pasha isn’t available. Perhaps I can help you.”

Gabriel considered making his request to Simon, but the matter was too important. “I need to speak with the pasha directly.” He didn’t trust either of them, but he had no one else to turn to.

“That’s not possible. If this is in regard to business, I’m the one to speak to. The pasha doesn’t get involved in that sort of thing.”

“It’s a personal matter,” Gabriel blurted out, unsure what other argument he could make to convince Simon.

Simon looked at him oddly, perhaps with a glint of amusement. “You’ll have to tell me more if I’m to convince the pasha.”

“Look, if this weren’t urgent, I wouldn’t have walked here in the middle of the night. All I want is ten minutes of his time. Please just tell him that.”

Simon looked Gabriel over, considering. “Very well, I’ll tell him, but I promise nothing.” He pointed to Gabriel’s hands. “It looks like you have frostbite. I’ll send someone to look after that.”

A servant arrived and brought Gabriel to a small marble bath, where he was instructed to place his hands into a basin of warm water. Gabriel’s entire body ached, but when he removed his hands from the water, the pain shocked him. Two of the fingers on his right hand had turned purple. The man returned with a lamp and looked over Gabriel’s hands. He pointed to the cuts on the fingers, which Gabriel had gotten from the brambles on his slide down the wooded hill, and explained in French, the shared language of foreigners in Istanbul, that if the cuts didn’t heal, he might lose those fingers.

Brought to a room, Gabriel sat waiting, staring at his bandaged hands. The servant had given him laudanum to quell the pain, but the memory of it remained with him like the border of a large continent he was always just about to cross.

He no longer trusted himself to know what to do. The room looked out over the Bosphorus, and as he stood there, the color of the sky gathered and thickened between the hills directly across the strait into a deep apricot stain so intense it seemed alive. A cat scrabbled to get in, but Gabriel was mesmerized by the glowing disk, still partially obscured by trees, that was rising from the Asian hills, increasing in brilliance until he was forced to look away.

He pulled the curtains shut and went to lie on the bed. He tried to sleep but could not keep his eyes closed against the vertigo of visiting scenarios of his young wife in the hands of the secret police. He ceased to hear the scratching of the cat.

Finally, a messenger came to tell Gabriel that Yorg Pasha would see him as soon as the pasha finished breakfast. While Gabriel waited, another scene played in his head. The chests filled with gold liras had been pushed up against his knees in the carriage, its leather window flaps drawn as it turned into Karaköy Square to mingle with the evening traffic. An enormous blast sounded behind them. He was tempted to open the flap but could not risk exposing himself. After they had passed through the wooded hills north of the city and were unloading the chests, he had asked his driver, Abel, about the explosion.

“It was dark,” Abel responded. “I don’t know.”

Abel was a member of the Istanbul cell. Gabriel planned to give him and his sister, Sosi, who had helped get the keys to the vault, enough money to disappear or travel to the commune in Karakaya. Once the chests were unloaded, Abel had taken him back to the city, dropped him off, and then disappeared. The carriage would be needed one more time-or so he had thought-to take him, Vera, and the gold to the ship that would transport them and their cargo to Trabzon. From there they would travel through the mountains to Karakaya.

A decade of political organizing, his dream within reach, and he was lying in a gilded room wondering whether his moment of weakness in marrying Vera would destroy everything he had worked for.

They had robbed the bank for gold to buy tools and building materials, livestock, more land, and rifles and pistols to replace those lost when their shipment of weapons from New York had been impounded in Istanbul’s harbor.

The commune’s proximity to the Russian-Ottoman border was a risk. The Russians might try to extend their territory again, as they had only a decade earlier. At the end of that war the Ottomans had ceded Artvin, which was less than a day’s travel from Karakaya and the commune. Gabriel and the settlers thought that the unstable dirt tracks winding through the mountains in place of roads and the vertiginous drops and long screes on either side would keep away the Russians with their heavy artillery. Still, the hundreds of pioneers that Gabriel envisioned for New Concord needed enough firepower to hold off a battalion of invading infantry.

The Russians weren’t the only danger. Without gold, without weapons, the community would starve or, defenseless, be slaughtered by the Ottoman authorities, who would feel threatened by a system with no privileged leaders and no distinction between rich and poor. None of the members of the commune were peasants, although several had grown up in the countryside and others had studied modern agriculture and animal husbandry. All would receive weapons training. If they got through the first year, word would spread, and as more people joined them, the commune would become self-sustaining. He had an image in his mind of white homespun cloth drying on a line before the restored walls of the monastery. He saw his sister lift one of the sun-soaked sheets and walk through into shadow.

Gabriel rose from the bed and moved the curtain aside. The light reflecting from the snow blinded him momentarily, but then he saw that the morning was well advanced. There was no sign of the cat. The gold was out there, he thought with satisfaction, just a few meters away beyond the frozen garden. When he first arrived in Istanbul, Gabriel had asked Simon’s permission to store some supplies in the pasha’s vast stables. After the robbery, he had simply added the chests from the bank, well camouflaged, to the jumble of other chests and supplies he was accumulating for his trip to the east. As long as the gold was safe and within reach, there was a future.

Gabriel tried the door to the room, but it was locked. He balled his fists and pounded on it, ignoring the pain that blazed through his hands, but there was no response. There was still Vera. He had to find his wife.